


Time Restarted

by Rasalahuge



Series: Concepts Series [2]
Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Multi, Soul Bond, Soulmate-Identifying Timers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-22
Updated: 2013-10-22
Packaged: 2017-12-30 04:37:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,526
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1014182
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rasalahuge/pseuds/Rasalahuge
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Soul Mates for the Concepts Series.</p>
<p>In a small town in Maine time restarted at 8.15pm and along with it so did all the Soul Mate timers of everyone living in the town. A collection of thoughts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Time Restarted

_In a small town in Maine time restarted at 8.15pm October 24th 2011._

_All across the town numbers etched into the skin just above the thrumming vein of the left wrist suddenly started to pulse in time with their heartbeats. Dozens of them suddenly began to countdown._

__

_Timers had started again._

__

Mary Margaret Blanchard felt the time on her wrist pulse and she turned her eyes on it. How long was it since she last noticed the time? How long since he had dreamt of the person that waited for her at the end of that countdown? How often had she talked to her students, told them of how when the numbers stopped you found the one person who would complete you? Whether they be a parent, a child, a siblings or a lover they would be there for you, forever.

_13d 1h 13m_

How had it gotten so low without her realising? What was she supposed to do when the moment she met her Soul Mate seemed so much closer than it ever had before?

Kathryn Nolan was sat looking at the picture of her lost husband when she felt an ache in her wrist. She automatically reached to rub it when her eyes caught sight of the numbers on her wrist. She remembered what felt like an age ago when she was young and David was perfect and they had laughed in the face of those who doubted their love could last. Soul Mates weren’t always lovers, they had pointed out, just because they weren’t each other’s Mates didn’t mean that they couldn’t be in love.

_116d 15h 18m_

It was said a part of you could feel the echo of your Mate before you ever met them. Just enough that you would recognise them if you passed on the street. Kathryn had known for a long time that she and David had been doomed, doomed by the shade of the two people waiting for them. She had been lying to herself for too long, she just wished that it hadn’t taken David walking out to realise that.

Marco Esposito had met his Soul Brother many years ago. So long ago now that he couldn’t even remember how he and Archie had met, it was as though he had always been there, since Marco’s parents had died when he was a child. Of course that wasn’t the case, but it often felt like that. And yet, despite knowing his Soul Brother for what felt like forever Marco was still waiting. Waiting for his timer to count down to the other person who would complete him. At first he expected a lover, as most people did when they had timers, but as the years passed and he met and then lost his wife he knew who was really waiting for him when the timer ended.

_185d 11h 17m_

He glanced down at the numbers on his wrist as Archie stopped by his shop late in the evening, taking Pongo out for a walk.

“Just six months to go?” Archie asked sounding ridiculously excited for a man who was going to have to learn to share his Soul Mate with another person, “It feels like we’ve been waiting forever and never getting any closer,”

“Six months,” Marco smiled and wondered in what form the son he’d been waiting his whole life for would take.

Paige Henderson watched the clock tower move from her bedroom window with a smile. She knew, deep down, that something special had just happened though she didn’t know what. Her parents were downstairs, oblivious to it, but when Paige looked up towards the one hill in Storybrooke, to the house at the top she saw the lights suddenly all get turned on. As if whoever lived there had just woken up. Paige looked down at the numbers on her wrist and smiled at them.

_244d 19h 3m_

She wondered what he’d be like, the one waiting for her. Her Mom and Dad said that he would be her prince charming that would whisk her off to live happily ever after, but only after she’d been to college and gotten a good job. She didn’t tell them that she’d much rather he wasn’t a prince charming and that she had no intention of being carried off to live happily ever after, especially not if it involved kissing boys. She didn’t think the he waiting for her was like that anyway. In her dreams he sang her to sleep and held her when she was sick or hurt and the only kisses were ones on her forehead in thanks for the pretend tea she poured him. In her dreams Paige called him Papa and when she woke up she felt guilty every time she looked at her Dad, because he loved her so much but didn’t understand her. The one waiting for her knew her inside and out.

“Soon Papa,” She murmured to herself and, with one last glance at the house on the hill, she turned away from the window and the clock tower.

The girl in the basement didn’t know her own name. She didn’t know what the sky looked like. She didn’t know anything outside her cell and the four concrete walls and the little gap through which light occasionally came along with drugged food and the cold smiling eyes. The girl in the basement was a blank slate and yet she knew one day she wouldn’t be. One day she’d get out of this place. She knew she would. She had proof.

_202d 23h 49m_

The countdown was important. In a world where nothing else made sense, where she knew neither name nor purpose, the countdown was a promise. In her heart she could feel that the countdown was the most important thing in the entire world. It marked not only the time until she became free of this cell, became something other than the girl in the basement, it marked the time when she would meet her sad monster.

She dreamed of her sad monster and sometimes he was so sad it made her cry but other times she’d smile at him in her dreams and he would smile back. Hesitant, as though he’d forgotten how.

When she was free she’d find her sad monster and then they’d both be able to smile again.

Regina Mills had not expected timers. She had been told that the curse would take them to a world where happy endings were impossible, a place where magic didn’t exist. The existence of timers then, gave her cause to panic. She’d been given the knowledge of timers when she’d arrived in this world, the bone deep understanding that the timers counted down to the one person who would fully understand and complete you. At first Regina had thought it was a false hope. Her True Love had died a long time ago and if her True Love wasn’t her Soul Mate then she didn’t know who it was. She had spent so long staring down at her wrist in confusion that the numbers felt like they were burned into the backs of her eyes.

_273d 19h 41m_

They were a lie, a false promise and worse than that their existence implied that one day her curse would break enough that time would restart. Not once in twenty eight years had the numbers changed, on her wrist or anyone else’s, not even on her son Henry’s wrist and he grew up the way no other child in the town did. So Regina waited, lived in denial that so long as the numbers didn’t change she was safe. After all they only meant it was possible to break the curse, which she’d known before she even cast it, it didn’t mean that the breaking was inevitable.

Besides the numbers were a lie anyway, Daniel was dead and had been for years. She stubbornly ignored the occasional dream where she was enveloped in a warm, loving embrace and a quiet voice she knew sang to her the way it never had outside of dreams.

  
_In a small town in Maine time restarted at 8.15pm October 24th 2011._

_Only four people noticed, only four people understood what it meant._

_One broke down and wept, for grief and for joy, nursing a drink and fighting the urge to use his hands to make yet another useless hat._

_Another raged, smashed everything within reach with his cane but for a chipped cup, cursing a false hope even as the numbers on his wrist promised reconciliation with the dead._

_The third stared at her wrist in numb shock and despair, knowing that the numbers were a countdown to an end and not a beginning._

_The fourth leant against the window ledge watching the town clock that had started to move. He looked at his wrist and wondered who was waiting on the other end of those numbers. No one in town, he knew, because he’d seen everyone else’s numbers and none of them matched. To him the numbers were a promise._

_A promise that happily ever after was finally returning._

**Author's Note:**

> Dates and times are taken from a combination of the air dates of episodes and any specifically mentioned time lags that took forever to work out and are probably wrong anyway.
> 
> In this AU Soul Mates are not necessarily True Loves so I didn't change Regina's after Quite a Common Fairy was aired (it was written several weeks beforehand)


End file.
